PHOTON TACHYON
TACHYON or PHOTON has been designed to facilitate the creation of shows and installations that involve complex programming, signal distribution and display of video content, and also include interactions with various external controllers and protocols such as DMX or MIDI.
A key characteristic of a powerful, efficient and easy-to-use software designed specifically for video projection in stage productions or installations should be to represent reality as accurately as possible. Therefore, TACHYON or PHOTON is based on a virtual representation of a physical stage’s three-dimensional space and its components. The virtual counterparts of projectors, screens, LED displays, lighting fixtures and stage props can be found in the 3D Scene module.
The properties of the virtual components included in the 3D Scene can be manipulated so they will perfectly match their physical counterparts. It is through the creation of these correlations that TACHYON or PHOTON is able to apply geometric corrections on a video feed to match the positioning and orientation of projectors and screens during stage production.
This particular approach explains a lot about the software’s structure. In a TACHYON or PHOTON project, technical components coexist in different ways (physical and virtual), but also across different modules in the software. TACHYON or PHOTON Screens are a perfect example of this, in that they act as pivot points between different TACHYON or PHOTON modules and the stage space. Screens simultaneously correspond to:
- physical screens in the stage or installation space;
- virtual representations of the physical screens in the 3D Scene module;
- content assignation structures in the Timeline module.
Screens in the Timeline can hold many layers, where multiple media clips can be placed sequentially. Whenever a new Screen is created in the 3D Scene, it will create its own dedicated content assignation structure in the Timeline.
This impacts the way video content is produced, programmed and shown. Instead of working in one large video space that will be cut up for many projectors, you work directly on separate Screens. Placing a media file on the Timeline in a Screen will automatically display the file’s content on its physical counterpart.